updated 03:25 am EST, Mon November 21, 2011

Occupy Flash movement calls for end to Flash

Occupy Flash, a group dedicated to seeing the end of the Flash platform, has called on all PC users to uninstall the Flash Player plugin from their desktop browsers. The group calls themselves "The movement to rid the world of the Flash Player plugin." As far as the group is concerned, the death of mobile Flash is not enough, and it wants to see the end of all Flash development.

The group has posted the following statement on the matter:

"Why, you ask? Why does it matter, when Adobe has already neutered the platform by publicly killing Flash on mobile devices? Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing? Well, as we've seen with other outdated web technologies...as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it."

Occupy Flash emphasises that it is not campaigning against Adobe, and in fact argues that Flash can still find a home for use on the Adobe Air platform to package native applications. They also claim that their site has no corporate backing and are "not a lobbying effort of any sort."

Adobe's Flash platform has been heavily criticised for its lack of security, its instability and inefficiency. Despite labored efforts to develop Flash for mobile devices, and in the face of staunch opposition from Apple under the late Steve Jobs, Adobe recently announced that it has ceased developing Flash for mobile devices.

In doing so, Adobe acknowledged that HTML5, an open web standard that supports embedded multimedia code, is the way of the future. "...HTML5 [is] the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms," said Adobe's Interactive Development VP Danny Winokur at the time of the announcement to kill mobile Flash development. However, he, and Adobe, were not yet ready to cede that Flash in any danger in the desktop space.

Microsoft action group

delusional

as much as I hate flash, and flash block is my goto plugin, html5 isn't ready for lots of drm content yet. All videos that can be should be converted to html5, but there is still a need for it on desktops in this case. Get it off mobiles, by all means, and websites shouldn't be using it, if they want mobile traffic.

HTML purism

Already dead

Flash just doesn't know it yet. As mobile devices become more ubiquitous Flash will be no more. Advertisers will realize that they are throwing their money away on Flash ads and then that will be the burial event.

Sadly HTML5 will then become as annoying as Flash with ads on web pages. I used to like Flash until it became such a browsing annoyance.

I agree

The whole point of the movement is simply that if it's a dead end technology, Adobe needs to just kill it and that will push along HTML 5 to mature much faster. What's the big deal? If Adobe has already stated that HTML 5 is the future, just kill flash and force the hand.

d-u-m-b movement

This is the dumbest movement I ever heard. I meant do you really need a movement to end Flash? Who are they to dictate what corporation should be doing? I assume these people don't work for Adobe Flash department and they don't need a job to feed their kids. Plus the movement doesn't contribute anything to our society, it is purely based on self-interest.

Too bad this group wasn't

around when Steve Jobs was alive. At least there would have been someone to back him up. The media made it as though Steve Jobs was the only person alive who didn't like Flash and that he and Apple alone were trying to destroy Flash for their own benefit.

Flash is Dead and Adobe Knows it

Adobe is killing Flash. The whole purpose of Flash is that it was on all browsers. You knew that if you had fancy web content, you could use Flash, and display it.

When the iPhone and iPad became big despite not having Flash meant two things 1). Flash wasn't really all that important, and 2). If you wanted to make sure your website worked with a big share of mobile OS users, you had to find a way to get around the "Flash" issue.

Despite Adobe's best efforts, they couldn't get the public to care. "The Whole Web" campaign failed. Maybe Flash might have done better if Adobe was faster at getting Flash working better with Android. (Despite what most Android fanboys claim, Flash is not a pleasant experience on the vast majority of Android devices). Maybe Adobe stood a better chance if it was another company besides Apple that headed the anti-Flash campaign. (Such a company might have blinked when it became obvious that a competitor was betting on Flash and Adobe was doing their best to get Flash working on portable devices). However, it didn't work. In the end, more and more websites are abandoning Flash.

Without mobile Flash, Flash is dead because the sole purpose of Flash was to provide a platform independent means of displaying complex web content. HTML5 is no Flash replacement if you mean it can do 100% of what Flash could. However, if HTML5 can deliver 50% of what Flash can do, then most sites will simply switch to HTML5 just because its supported by all major web platforms.

Huh?

As others have already said, Flash has been a moribund technology for quite some time now - the only reason it still manages to survive is in the hundreds of lazy webdesigners who have become used to one-size-fits-all c***, especially when we visit travel agency sites and the like.

This movement is absolutely legitimate and should be supported by anyone with an IQ above 70.

As for me, Click2Flash is always on and is ONLY deactivated when I definitely have no choice to see the same necessary content by other means.

Free to choose

Anyone who wants to use Flash or Silverlight or Java on their website should be free to do so.
The web is full of poor design, bad content and psudo-facist movements like this one.
Being free to make your own bad decisions is part of what makes the web great.